This application requests support for a multidisciplinary working conference on the future of cognitive aging research to be held at Pennsylvania State University in the spring of 2005. The conference will be cosponsored by the Population Research Institute and the Gerontology Center of The Pennsylvania State University, and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging of the University of Wisconsin. Building upon the mandates set by the National Research Council's Committee on Future Directions for Cognitive Research on Aging, articulated in The Aging Mind: Opportunities in Cognitive Research (National Research Council, 2000), the conference will explore further the state of our knowledge with an eye toward developing a shared multidisciplinary agenda for the next few decades of research on cognitive aging. We have invited a number of the leading international experts on cognitive aging representing the fields of developmental psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, demography, gerontology, sociology, economics, biostatistics, and epidemiology to gather for a two and one-half day working conference focusing on the state of the field and building a multidisciplinary agenda for future research on cognitive aging. The conference has attracted top researchers from Australia, England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, countries where the majority of research on cognitive aging is done. The main objectives of the conference are to explore: (1) the current state of the cognitive theorizing as related to processes of aging, (2) an empirical assessment of what is known about cognitive aging phenomenon in terms of changes and causes, (3) methodological critiques of research designs and measurement models on which our current knowledge base rests, (4) the discussion of alternative designs and innovative lines of interdisciplinary research that promise how we can know more, and (5) the critical issues of the data needs for the future. We expect to disseminate the information resulting from this conference widely in both traditional academic outlets (e.g. an edited volume) and through the organization of GSA symposia on the topic, as well as press releases at the time of the conference and executive summaries of the conference results for NIH use.